Thursday, April 12, 2012

OpenEd Evangelist Interview

I spoke with a member of BYU's Computer Science Department ("the Professor"). He has worked there since 1984, timely received tenure, and is currently approximately 4-6 years from retirement.

I originally intended to discuss Open Data with the Professor; however, he was well-versed in Open Access and expressed a preference to discuss that topic instead if possible. I obliged. I was into my second sentence of the overview, and the Professor excitedly began his own overview of the topic, the arguments on both sides, his conclusions, and noted briefly the current research he is doing in the area. :)

Overview/Prediction: The professor predicted that OA will eventually overtake the scholarly journals just as Internet resources have overtaken Encyclopedias. There are, however, unique barriers OA faces that will cause non-OA sources to survive longer than Encyclopedias.

Advantages of OA:

The Professor noted that open access (OA) is a win-win situation. Authors gain a wider audience for their work, and students and teachers gain greater access to scholarly work. I added other advantages to the list (e.g. Internet publications could receive more hits and draw more advertising). The Professor acknowledge these advantages.

OA Questions/Barriers:

The Professor focused his remarks on the questions regarding and the barriers to OA.

Questions

The Professor quickly listed a number questions; he focused on these two:

(1) Who will pay for storage/retrieval of materials?

Response: (See "Current Research" section below)

(2) How do you determine the quality of the material?

Response: Peer review is intended to monitor quality. OA could still feature peer review. In the alternative, qualifying readers could “rate” articles in OA journals/publications.

Barriers

(1) Momentum is still behind traditional journals. “Old people” (i.e. those currently in power) don’t like new technology/ideas beyond those that have served them well during their careers and are less likely to abandon text and tradition for OA and computer-mediated journals. "Young people" (i.e. those just starting their career) rely on those currently in power to obtain career advancement and recognition. Tenure, for example, is still based on the metrics of prestige of journal over number of citations.

Personal observation: This is why Christensen's "disruption" is difficult in OA. Potential disrupters heavily rely on those they would disrupt.

(2) Publishers of traditional journals do not have incentive to stop charging money at this time, period.

Consequently, the most likely actors, old people, young people, and publishers, are not acting at this time. I pointed out that if the so-called young people came to power and changed the standards for tenure, the cycle would discontinue. He agreed, but expressed that many of the incentives that old people enjoy would be offered to young people.

Current Research: Professor is currently determining if there is a way to decrease the costs associated with mass storage and retrieval (to address cost issues like those Wikipedia is facing). He terms the concept “distributed systems."

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